WHY DOES FALCONRYMATTER?

The debate on human/animal relationships and the quest for post-human culture

What is falconry, if we regard it in the global landscape of the contemporary culture? What is its real value? Why does it really matter? What can it bring to the relevant debates in the present day's intellectual context? How can we, as the falconer community, contribute to the enrichment and the diversification of the world culture of our times? There are two ways of answering these questions. The obvious answer remains concentrated on the past and the necessity of transmission of the received heritage. The less obvious answer focus on the future, the perspectives of human relationships with the natural world and the challenge of creating a new, up-to-dated legacy for next generations. Undoubtedly, falconry should be regarded as valid and important, because it is a form of cultivation that refers to an ancient heritage, building a link between past and present, reinforcing identities through the transmission of a lore from generation to generation, situating the contemporary man in a larger context of lasting, immemorial values. Being a living culture, falconry remains strongly rooted in the past. This aspect has been recognized and accentuated in the UNESCO statement on falconry as Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Humanity, that describes and qualifies it using such expressions as “traditional activity” and „cultural heritage” that is “passed on from generation to generation”, providing “a sense of belonging, continuity and identity”. The aims that the resolution indicates and the activities it proposes have essentially the character of “conservation”: increasing the “awareness of intangible cultural heritage and its importance” in order to ensure its “transmission”. Such expressions situate the falconry as a connection between the present and the past, a very ancient past indeed. But what about the future? The presence of birds of prey in the human world can be situated among other examples of trans-species partnership in hunting. Such partnerships are known not only in case of the man; such partnerships exist also in nature: different species of animals sometimes collaborate and help each other in a number of quite surprising ways in order to catch their respective prey. But in the typically human, cultural context, the relationship between man and the bird of prey became something more than a simple technique of obtaining proteins; it developed well beyond its basic function of hunting collaboration. Falconry gave origin to a complex symbolic system, bearing a richness of meanings and values. Undoubtedly, this system of meanings is something worth being cultivated today, even if the space for any hunting activity in the contemporary world is reduced. It's easy to predict that this progressive reduction will continue in the future, possibly leading to the total disappearance of the wilderness and the necessity of rethinking the very concept of “wild”. Even now, the reality and the meaning of hunting with falcons is deeply changed, as the most appreciated kinds of prey, such as houbara bustards, are often bred in captivity in order to be released deliberately for falconry hunting event. In fact, this process has already excluded the concept of “wild” prey as well as the notion of “venison” (meat of non-domesticated animals). Logically, falconry cannot be regarded any longer as a way of acquiring it. But the disappearance of the prey is not the only problem. The physical space occupied by nature, the space falconry still claims and explores today, may be soon transformed into a reality of strictly protected reserves, reduced to infinitesimal margin of the world occupied by extensive agriculture and urbanization. Even the wastelands, in which many of the best falconry traditions had been born and cultivated over the centuries, should be regarded now as fragile and endangered environments in accelerated change, increasingly transformed by human presence. Is there any place for falconry in a futuristic vision of the ever-growing, solar-powered city expanding even in the most inhospitable desert? I argue that it is precisely in such a scenario that the cultural role of falconry may grow. Its practice may fit perfectly the needs of the time to come. It is indeed very symptomatic that falcons are often found in the contemporary cities, treating our concrete buildings as just another kind of rocks to nest on. This fact proves the adaptability of the species of Falconidae and maybe also their special predisposition to share the anthroposphere, the space inhabited and transformed by man. At the same time, their presence, the practice of falconry and the deepening of the relation man/bird that the falconry essentially is, may offer to man an invaluable substitute of the disappearing wilderness. Even if hunting, in the meaning that we used to give to the word, may become totally impracticable in the future, the relationship issued from the ancient collaboration of hunters may remain vital for both: the human partner and the bird, as the cultural importance of falconry may offer to several species of birds of prey increased chances of protection and survival in the post-natural world. The key aspect of falconry that remains promissory for the future is the cultivation of the “pure relationship”, going beyond any practical, utilitarian sense, such as obtaining meat. Even in the forms of falconry that used to be practiced during the past centuries in Europe and are still practiced today in many traditional cultural contexts, the scarcity of food, or any other utilitarian reason, rarely, if ever, could be the main motivation for breeding falcons. The sense of falconry has always resided in being together, creating a community of man and bird. This is a self-explaining activity, an aim in itself, without any external use, finality or justification. The importance of such special relationships, that became rare in the present day's experience, has recently led to the establishment of a new field of studies and of an innovative current in philosophical reflection, creating a very particular climate for rethinking falconry and its place in the contemporary culture. So called human/animal studies (HAS), a branch of the reflection in the domain of posthumanism, become increasingly popularity among the scholars. This new discipline, that emerged for the first time in mid-80ties, gained considerable ascendance in the first decade of the new millennium, with such a result that at the present moment there exists a bibliography of hundreds, if not thousands of studies relevant to the field. Nonetheless, it would be a blatant lie if I said that falconry gave a substantial contribution to this massive production of ideas in human/animal studies. It hasn't been so. The typical HAS dissertation speaks either about dogs, or apes. The falconer's contribution to the field still remains to be done. And it could be an important one; it might reorient the debate in many of its crucial points, such as the relations of dependence/independence between human and non-human partners, the notions of “wild” and “tame”, the interpenetration of “nature” and “culture” as factors of human/animal interaction, and so on. There is also much to be said on the value and the place of falconry in globalizing culture, as a presence that is connected not only with the continuity and transmission of the old cultural forms and practices, but also with the quest for new ones and the creation of a new patrimony for the future. If we call falconry a “heritage”, we shouldn't understand by this word exclusively the legacy that we, as the present generation, have obtained from our ancestors, but also the patrimony of practices and ideas we are called to create now in order to offer it, as a renovated, actualized legacy, to the next generations. It is important to create a non-anachronistic understanding of falconry that would be our investment for the future. It is in order to promote this futuristic aspect of our reflection on falconry that I would like to bring closer to the falconer community some aspects that may be less known or less present in our consciousness, those of the recent philosophical debate and the emergent fields of studies in the humanities. This context creates an attractive field that falconry could and should occupy, contributing in quite a novel way to the enrichment of the cultural landscape in the contemporary world. The general public may be less aware of the fact that this importance of falconry as a tool of philosophical reflection may be still something valid today. But in fact it is, as one of central philosophical currents of our times, the post-humanism, points to the necessity of redefinition of the concept of man as related or even opposed to other forms of life and proposes to study all forms of relationship between man and other living beings. Not only in the past, but also today, falconry comes very close to some central problems of the philosophical reflection. Would it appear as surprising that falconry and philosophy really come together? It might not seem so, at the first glimpse. For the centuries gone by, the falcon would be regarded as the companion of a man of action, a knight or a courtier; for more recent times, falconry could be associated with an active lifestyle in the open air, with a figure of a conservationist perhaps, but not with a philosopher and his or her refined intellectual discourse. Well, if we go a bit deeper into the matter, falconer's ways in the past crossed quite often the path of those reflecting on the place of man in the nature. For what concerns the medieval times, both in the West and in the East, the falcon could have well been called a philosopher’s bird. With the endeavors of Frederic II, falconry helped to establish an early starting point for the empirical study of nature in general, contributing to the birth of scientific approach to the reality. During the Middle Ages, the art of falconry became a kind of living demonstration of philosophical truths, showing how human reason may interact with something opposed to it, i.e. the instinctive action and the principle of wilderness represented by the bird of prey. For many a Renaissance thinker, the essential vision of the universe, that of the cosmic harmony, was perfectly exemplified in the image of the falconer and his bird. But these examples show not only that falconry may stand for something else as a symbol. Its practice may also become a key experience and a starting point for a reflection leading to the formulation of new concepts or a new vision concerning the situation of man in the world, the frontiers and the definition of humanity, and finally the answer to the basic philosophical question: “what's the man?”. Falconry can still play its role as a tool of thinking in the context of contemporary philosophical reflection. The partnership that we find in falconry has a special character, unique in the context of our usual relationships with pets and other domestic animals. Both participants of the interaction implied in the practice of falconry, the human and the non-human, remain, to quite unusual extent, autonomous participants, developing their action independently from one another, and nonetheless in perfect collaboration. A tamed falcon is not domesticated in the same sense as the other animals that accompany the man throughout the history. The birds of prey, even in captivity, often conserve full or only slightly impaired aptitude to live in their wild state. They never become truly dependent on man. The released falcon may not return, is not forced to return – this is perhaps the most thrilling, and at the same time the defining element of the relationship we deal with in falconry. The possibility and the lure of independent existence remains constantly present. The falcon's return is thus always uncertain, and the decision of releasing the bird express a subtle and complex mixture of hope, confidence and risk. This dimension of gratuitousness, autonomy and arbitrariness had been noticed and accentuated in the symbolical systems developed in different cultures. This is exactly how and why falconry had become more important that proteins as a lofty ideal exposing such contradicting values as freedom and fidelity or trust and risk that shape this constant interplay of man and bird. Falconry became a kind of imaginary model or paradigm that helps to overcome the contradiction between the values that apparently exclude one another and to achieve a level of spiritual perfection that comes together with falconry in so many cultures. At the same time, falconry possess a transcultural value. By this neologism I understand not only that it exists in many cultures occupying a large expansion of the world, from Western world and North Africa to Korea and Japan, but also that it forms a universally understandable expression of some basic ideas in human thinking about the world, such as the idea of assumption and flight, the mediation between the low and the lofty, the earth and the skies. This is why the falconry could become, in many moments of the human history, a surprising link between distant cultural circles. Forming a community and a partnership with a bird offers an opportunity of forgetting – at least for some short, but invaluable moments, – the fact of being a man, with all the inherent bonds and limitations of the human condition. Falconry is a promise of release from the “prison of culture” in which man is incessantly bound to unavoidably reductive identities and forced to think according to such distinctions as “ours”/”alien”, “familiar”/”stranger”, “tame”/”wild”. This is how falconry might become one of the keys for the posthumanistic reflection. One of its aims is to break through the categories that have dominated in the Western way of thinking and the philosophical reflection over the last centuries. The transhumanistic aspiration is even more daring: it is a dream of improving radically the humanity, making it trespass its own limitations. Falconry, constantly dealing with the human dream of flying with the falcons, had incarnated this aspiration long before the concept of transhumanism was forged. Today, it still offers the possibility of achieving a transcultural condition, building a new dimension of the mental space, in which it would be easier to overcome the reductive oppositions, narrow frontiers of communities and being condemned to think in the framework established by the culturally determined categories. As a form of „breaking through the culture”, falconry becomes a paradoxical self-transgression of man and self-transgression of culture. In a sense, living so close with a bird of pray presupposes a partial abandonment of being human, which can be fully realized only in cultural framework, being human understood precisely as developing and deepening the cultural condition, living in and through culture. In other words, falconry is at the same time a cultural and a transcultural practice. As such, it becomes an important step towards the posthumanistic aspiration of trespassing the human condition. It might be seen as a way to open a new chapter in the becoming of the mankind, establishing a dimension of extended, birdlike condition, offering – in several different meanings – an experience beyond being human. The posthumanist project is often seen as a radical rupture, taking up the challenge of a new form of existence without roots or even in opposition to the roots that would link the “post-humans” with the “ancient” humanity. Nonetheless, in the history of culture we can also find roots of the posthumanism itself, that deserve to be identified, explored, reinterpreted and developed. Falconry might be situated among these roots or become closely related to them. The quest for new cultural forms and activities for the future doesn't deal exclusively with absolute novelty, but also with continuity and fulfillment of aspirations that may be identified in very ancient heritage. The longing for trespassing the limitation of the cultural condition might be as old as the longing for going beyond the anatomical and physiological limitations of human body – shortly speaking, the dream of flying as the falcon flies. On the other hand, the progress of the human/animal studies that grow unilaterally into some kind of vegetarian vision of the world and the new consciousness they create could be lethal to the falconry tradition. For many people, this is the current that strongly opposes any practice of hunting, presented as obsolete at the stage of post-humanity we are supposed to reach. This is why it becomes so important to make the falconry voice audible in the context of this debate. Undoubtedly, the bird of prey accompanied the man for thousands of years, as the man led a nomadic existence in the steppes. And also later on, the falcon remained, associated with new values in diverse human cultures. This was recognized at the international level by UNESCO, that declared falconry as part of Intangible Heritage of Humanity. But what could it mean to those who say that it is a necessary to close this chapter, this hunting nomadic existence of man for which there is no space left in the crowded world we live in? Of course, the posthumanist point of view may seem so radical and the majority of us may believe to be very far from such moment of “closing the chapter” in the history of humanity. But at the intellectual level, this current is growing in strength. At the same time, the changing reality of the contemporary world, with the progressive disappearance of the wilderness, leaves less and less space for the worlds of falconry, both in Western culture and in all the traditional cultures to which the UNESCO recognition was closely related. Thus, the question remains: will the falcon remain with us, as we enter this prophesied stage of post-humanity? Personally I believe this new stage of human existence makes falconry as important as it could be in medieval or Renaissance times. Evidently, our ancestors rarely relied on falcons for their sustenance. If they ever ate any meat their birds gave to them, it was in an act of symbolic commensality (feasting together) of man and the bird. This relationship anticipated many of the post-humanistic experience the philosophers and the intellectuals write about right now. There is an important contribution that falconry can give to the reflection which is developed right now, enriching it by diversification of points of view and enlarging its horizons. In the debate on human/animal relationships, falconry should occupy an important place. If we consider birds, man never established any deeper, more meaningful relationship than that with falcons and hawks. Falconry introduces a new perspective into the debate on domestication, as the falcon is at the same time tamed and not completely tamed, between the anthroposphere and the wilderness. The possibility of going astray had always made the falcon a symbol of liberty and autonomy in relationship. In the past, it used to be a symbol for love, marriage or the closeness between man and God. In the contemporary perspective, it could became a paradigm of renegotiated, post-human relationship, extendible for the rest of the animal kingdom. Falconry implies a dimension that a relation between man and a dog or a horse never had. This is why I see falconry as an operating key of reflection and a tool of thinking, not as something that, at the intellectual level, we should inscribe uniquely into the domain of the “heritage”. This patrimony that – seen from the perspective of the general public (outside the limited community of falconers) – is often reduced to the status of a mere occasional attraction, may also become a vital nor defining element of the contemporary life. The intellectual climate of our times may create a great space for falconry, equal or even larger than that the past centuries reserved for it. This is why our practice is far from marginal or obsolete. It is something more than just a historical curiosity, a remaining trace of cultural and social realities gone by for centuries. By the contrary, it's something that we can put in the center of debate right now and treat as an asset for the creation of new cultural legacies. Falconry is not only a heritage of the past, but also something truly futuristic.